Death Becomes Her: The Decadent Aesthetics of Dying in Sarah Bernhardt’s La Dame Aux Camélias

Guest post: Meredith Conti, University at Buffalo, SUNY

The late nineteenth-century star actress knew how to die. Her repertoire – devised to appeal to white, bourgeois European and US American audiences – customarily featured an array of doomed women who died onstage or just out of the audience’s view: Greek heroines, Shakespearean wives, terminally ill ingenues transposed from French and Italian novels, and perhaps even a few contemporary ‘neurotics’ like Hedda Gabler or the second Mrs. Tanqueray. Deaths on the nineteenth-century stage were not just histrionic claptraps; indeed, the era’s critics publicly chastised actors who they felt milked or cheapened such moments (both before and after the advent of theatrical realism). Embodying the act of dying required that performers bring into affective alignment a constellation of inputs and impulses from the medical, theatrical, and sociocultural spheres. The exigencies of storytelling further contoured the temporal and spatial dimensions of performed dying. Whereas the century’s Mercutios had minutes of onstage dying time and routinely lurched about the stage, wounded and raving, Ravenswood’s Lucy Ashton died in mere seconds after descending into madness, her demise punctuated by a single scream and a quick collapse. As such examples suggest, gender crucially shaped how theatrical deaths were scripted, simulated, and spectated. For nineteenth-century actors, dying onstage commonly meant dying tragically. For actresses, dying onstage commonly meant dying pathetically and prettily. To that end, many women performers availed themselves of a time-tested assortment of gestures, postures, vocalities, costumes, and cosmetics in order to aestheticize the deaths of their characters.

Sarah Bernhardt in La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. 1882. Downey, W. & D. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Few plays imbricated theatrical death and feminine beauty as completely as Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame Aux Camélias (1852). Its heroine Marguerite Gautier’s occupation – a high-priced Parisian courtesan – and her fatal illness – consumption – nearly guaranteed that she would perish beautifully (Fig. 1). (As Carolyn A. Day notes, despite consumption’s many painful and unglamorous symptoms, its sufferers’ willowy silhouettes, carved cheekbones, and flushed complexions became coveted signs of physical beauty that defined ‘consumptive chic’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).[⁠1] From the 1850s to the 1930s, hundreds of actresses performed the character’s story of love, loss, and redemption, including her Act Five tubercular death in the arms of paramour Armand Duval.[⁠2] La Dame Aux Camélias’s production history spanned the rise and fall of cultural movements invested in asking existential questions and innovating artistic forms and practices, among them romanticism, naturalism, symbolism, and decadence. Despite the play’s reputation at the century’s end as an outmoded melodrama, it was in fact supple enough to withstand (and even be responsive to) such ideological and aesthetic variations. And while the maxims and methodologies of those associated with decadence in late-nineteenth-century Europe predate the fin de siècle – to be sure, many are active within La Dame Aux Camélias’s pathographic narrative and its dissolute, self-absorbed demi-monde – Marguerite’s emblematic decadence resonated anew in the century’s last decades through the work of stage stars like Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Olga Nethersole, captivating audiences who had written off La Dame Aux Camèlias as hopelessly antiquated in both style and science. Rather than engage in a comprehensive analysis of how actresses performed Marguerite’s consumption (an undertaking I have attempted elsewhere),[⁠3] here I would like to assess Bernhardt’s final scene as a landmark performance of decadent dying.

A late flowering of romanticism that challenged realism’s dominance in the 1880s and 1890s, experiments with theatrical decadence developed in Europe as an oft-conflated artistic cousin of the symbolist and aesthetic movements, and as a harbinger of modernist thoughts and twentieth-century modes of cultural production.⁠ In Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle (2014), Christopher Nissen and Maria Härmänmaa note that ‘decadence’ is an evocative, flexible term that ‘can reflect a mode of expression, a thematic inclination, a stylistic attitude, or an aesthetic tendency’.⁠[4] John R. Reed similarly cautions that fin-de-siècle decadence should not be regarded either ‘as a social phenomenon or as an aesthetic definition’; it was always both.[⁠5] Few venues help illuminate decadence’s multivalency better than the period’s theatres, each one a localized ‘performative commons’ where artists and audiences together proposed and enacted (in words, images, embodiments, and encounters) ways of making and re-making the world.⁠[6] As a general rule, decadent performances at the fin de siècle rejected the presumptive centrality of classical or realistic traditions, though as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891) evinces, classic stories could be adapted into decadent plays. While playwrights and theatre makers associated with decadence celebrated a Wildean ethos of individualism, artifice, and beauty (all of which were means and ends), decadent ideas and ideals could find expression in even the most anti-artifice of performance genres: naturalism.⁠[7] The late nineteenth-century stage proved well-equipped to engage ‘decadent’ preoccupations with deterioration, decay, and endings (be they corporeal, temporal, and/or cultural), as well as an ‘exaltation of sickness’ as a path toward human insight that the healthy and ‘normal’ could not access.⁠[8] ‘In the decadent perspective on life’, writes Pirjo Lyytikainen, ‘malady attains value at the expense of health; moreover, the embrace of decay characteristic of the movement constitutes in itself a manifesto for sickness…Art needs sickness to be true art’.[⁠9] (Also on this blog, Adam Alston’s ‘On Sick Performance and Theatre’s Chronic Maladies’ elaborates on theatre’s chronic association with plagues, be they biomedical, moral, or creative).

Bernhardt’s public persona was itself a choreographed performance of fin-de-siècle decadence, one that drew upon an aesthetics of excess, affect, transgression, eroticism, and the macabre. In image and on stage, the actress’s appearance became synonymous with artifice: face often painted in shades of alabaster and rose; curly hair barely ‘tamed’ into a pre-Raphaelite coiffure; and statuesque body clad in daring or embellished clothing, be it a shoulder-baring drape, belle époque gown, or masculine pantsuit. Bernhardt, unlike her unofficial stage rival Eleonora Duse, embraced the corset as a means of achieving the idealized feminine silhouettes of the period; the garment’s rigid architecture was artifice at its most blatant, gendered, and fetishized. Like other international stage stars of the period, Bernhardt traveled by trains that also conveyed scenery, costumes, and members of her acting company. Unlike her peers, however, she brought with her a menagerie of domesticated and exotic animals, a large entourage of service personnel, and a carriage ‘to which horses would be hitched at each stop on the tour’.[⁠10] Perhaps most transparently, Bernhardt’s lifelong obsession with sickness and dying allied her with decadent theatre and literature in France. In her autobiography My Double Life (1907), Bernhardt recalled a childhood of ill health and an adulthood punctuated by suffering for both art and romance, including consumptive-esque bouts of coughing up blood in response to overwork or heartbreak.[⁠11] Her half-sister Régine’s protracted death from tuberculosis, too, proved a determinative event for the actress. An eager connoisseur of the medical and macabre, Bernhardt claimed to sleep in a coffin (an act memorialized in a well-circulated photograph); studied dissections and corpses at Paris’s École Pratique d’Anatomie; and amassed a personal collection of memento mori.[⁠12] Small wonder that critics and audiences tended to conflate Bernhardt with her most iconic ill character, Marguerite Gautier.

Act Five opens on Marguerite’s bedchamber. Once the opulent boudoir of a prosperous courtesan, it is now a starkly appointed sickroom. Marguerite, suffering from late-stage consumption and (or from) a broken heart, has sold some belongings to pay off creditors and gifted others to her friends and servants. Bernhardt’s Marguerite lay in bed wearing a white nightgown, weak and seemingly resigned to her fate. Her face, framed by lengths of wavy hair, is both pale and flushed (likely applied by Bernhardt in the form of powders and rouges). ‘Nanine, donne-moi a boire, veux-tu?’ [‘Nanine, give me a drink, will you?’], she calls softly to her maid (Fig. 2). The disease’s physiological authority within Marguerite’s body, which Bernhardt’s performance across the previous four acts purposely left unsettled, is now unmistakable.

Sarah Bernhardt in La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. 1913. Photoprint copyrighted by Rochlitz-Wheeler.

Tuberculosis, known across the ages as consumption, phthisis, the ‘white plague’, and the ‘wasting disease’, was endemic in Europe from the 1600s to the 1800s, during which time it was responsible for roughly one-quarter of all deaths.⁠[13] Bolstered by consumption’s immense societal impacts and unsettled etiology, a robust mythology clung to the disease throughout the nineteenth century, one that aggrandized its victims, dignified their deaths, and made meaning of the illness’s inscrutable patterns of recovery and relapse. What literature scholar Clark Lawlor terms the ‘Romantic myth’ of consumption consolidated Renaissance and Enlightenment understandings of the disease with cultural and medical discourses developing in the early 1800s.⁠[14] Notably, some eighteenth and nineteenth-century physicians hypothesized that a decadent lifestyle (eating rich foods, enjoying sedentary leisure activities, etc.) left those with financial or social privilege particularly vulnerable to developing consumption. As consumption summarily dispatched the Romantics’ most promising writers, composers, and painters (including John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eugène Delacroix, and a number of the Brontë siblings), its reputation as an inherited illness of the brilliant, beautiful, passionate, and privileged inspired an abundance of cultural works across Great Britain and the continent. Of these, Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame Aux Camélias proffered to European and North American reading publics an iconic consumptive: the alluring, tender-hearted courtesan Marguerite Gautier. By 1852, Marguerite had stepped onto the popular stage in the first of dozens of theatrical adaptations.

Thirty-four years after La Dame Aux Camélias appeared in print, German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch stood in front of the Berlin Physiological Society and declared he had discovered tuberculosis’s pathogenic cause: the microscopic and contagious Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Though it took several decades before the medical community fully accepted Koch’s bacteriological findings – not to mention the paradigm shifts triggered by germ theory’s ascension – consumption’s mythologized exclusivity eventually crumbled under the (in)significant weight of its infectious rod-shaped bacilli. Still, the consumptive myth’s ‘sentimental fantasies’ (to use Susan Sontag’s phrase) stubbornly persisted beyond Koch’s 1882 pronouncement, sustained in no small part by regular late nineteenth-century productions of La Dame Aux Camélias (often titled Camille in stateside stage and film adaptations).⁠[15] Actresses embodying Marguerite in the century’s last decades, then, were tasked with navigating tuberculosis’s mythic past and clinical present. Bernhardt’s neo-Romantic depiction of Marguerite’s illness, which profited from the actress’s expansive postural and gestural vocabularies as well as her ‘voix d’or’ [‘golden voice’], commingled what Victor Hugo once theorized as the sublime and the grotesque.⁠[16] Furthermore, in performing Dumas’s romantic text at the fin de siècle, Bernhardt helped tie the play’s social critiques to her own era’s acute interest in declines both individual and collective. Indeed, as Härmänmaa attests, ‘The importance of death during the fin de siècle, particularly in décadisme and decadentismo (the French and Italian decadent movements), was closely related to the idea of cultural and societal decay’.[17]

Marguerite’s hushed exchanges with her watchful caregivers and friends are interrupted with the entrance of Armand, the man she loved but had publicly rebuffed in Act Four in order to save him from a lifetime of scandal by association. He is desperate to see her, to be with her. Bernhardt’s Marguerite rises, ecstatic and impatient to escape her sickroom: ‘Armand! I said this morning that only one thing could save me. I had given up hoping for it – and then you came. We must lose no time, beloved. Life was slipping away from me, but you came and it stayed…. Bring my outdoor things, Nanine. I want to go out’.[18]

Moving about the room with an energy seemingly incompatible with her advanced stage of tuberculosis, Marguerite’s abrupt transformation is not just an invention of Bernhardt’s or Dumas’s. It is inspired by the medically-documented phenomenon of spes phthisica, or the ‘hope of the consumptive’. Soon, however, her ill body founders; it cannot sustain her delusory optimism. Armand calls for the doctor as Marguerite shouts, ‘yes, yes! Tell him that Armand has come back that I want to live, that I must live’. She then grows contemplative and voices a raw realization, the anagnorisis of her personal tragedy: ‘But if your coming has not saved me, nothing will. I have lived for love, now I am dying of it’.[19]

According to 1800s medicocultural discourse, spes phthisica was a temporary hallucinatory state, typically activated in the final stages of consumption, during which the sufferer no longer recognized the gravity of their condition. The consumptive’s renewed vitality encouraged them to imagine health returning and life persisting before the hallucinations cruelly dissolved, drawing them closer to death than before. The ‘hope of the consumptive’ was an abundantly theatrical phenomenon, bringing with it a cycle of recovery and relapse that briefly ‘healed’ sufferers before plunging them back into their terminal illness. The Era characterized Bernhardt’s almost religious deliverance in Act Five as ‘a euthanasia, a swansong, a perfect end… She lifts her arms, her face is upturned, she stands reaching upwards to heaven; she is transfigured, quite a divine light of love illuminates her, her beautiful eyes, her smile’.⁠[20] In the context of fin-de-siècle decadence, Bernhardt’s embodiment of spes phthisica was corporeal deterioration masquerading as – and perhaps also leading to – incorporeal glory (Fig. 3). As Nissen and Härmänmaa remind us, ‘Death, as the culmination of the process of degeneration, in time emerged as a central motif of fin-de-siècle Decadence, revealing a peculiar fascination not only for the death of beauty, but also death in beauty, the sublimely aesthetic experience of mourn en beauté (dying in beauty)’.⁠[21]

Sarah Bernhardt in La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. Downey, W. & D. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Bernhardt has uttered her last words as Marguerite. Her pantomimic dying sequence begins as Bernhardt embraces her acting partner, using his body to support her weight. Bernhardt biographer May Agate recounts the actress’s kinesthetic labors in the play’s last moments:

For a period, she always stood up just before the final collapse which occurred in Armand’s arms, on an embrace. She had her right arm (the downstage one) round his neck, and in her hand she held a handkerchief – death as indicated by her hand opening and quivering convulsive – the handkerchief fluttering to the ground. The arm then slipped of its own weight from Armand’s neck, first slowly along his shoulder, then dropped suddenly over the edge to her side – and  you knew she was gone. Armand, feeling her grow heavy and inert in his arms, moved away to peer into her face, keeping tight hold of her other hand, this jerked her backward, and the next movement she fell to the floor, where she lay still.[⁠22]

That Bernhardt cast her right arm as the signifier of Marguerite’s beautiful death is noteworthy. For Sharon Marcus, Bernhardt manifested her characters’ inner emotions and thoughts through an embodied repertoire of ‘exteriority effects’, including her use of ‘mobility,’ ‘tempo control’, ‘hyperextension’, and ‘framing’ (or the isolated use of a single moving body part).[23] With their view of Bernhardt’s face obstructed, audiences were impelled to track Marguerite’s death by reading her arm’s gradual release of muscular tension, the descent of the white handkerchief spelling surrender. Bernhardt’s body completed its rotation around the actor playing Armand as it descended to the floor. There it lay, parallel to the stage, still and beautiful.

In an essay that affiliates Bernhardt’s performances with the growth of industrial modernism and art nouveau, Victoria Duckett lingers on the ‘signature spiral’ that Bernhardt deployed to remarkable effect in plays like La Dame Aux Camélias: ‘While Bernhardt suggested that it was by chance that she incarnated the spiraling, circular art nouveau line in such an innovative and spectacular way, it is telling that, once achieved, it was not discarded’.[24] As French critic Francisque Sarcey noted of Bernhardt’s singular approach to physicalizing Marguerite’s death:

Mme Bernhardt stands – it is the movement imprinted, stamped in the [theatrical] program – but instead of sitting herself down again for her last words, and murmuring them seated, as was the tradition, she remains standing, breathing life in with all the strength of her being, defying death. Then, using herself as a pivot, she reels and makes a half-turn and, as if finally vanquished, she falls from her height in the most elegant and poetic pose imaginable.[25]

Accounts like Sarcey’s evince that decadence suffused Bernhardt’s death as Marguerite. To embody mourn en beauté, Bernhardt aestheticized the final moments of tubercular decline through an ‘elegant and poetic’ gestural vocabulary that denied neither the disease’s savage nature nor the theatrical significance of the courtesan’s iconic attractiveness. In employing sculptural poses, a trembling arm, a falling handkerchief, and a choreographed pivot that rendered Marguerite’s descent from standing to supine both tragic and enthralling, Bernhardt married the consumptive’s physical degeneration to her metaphysical transcendence, a decadent death befitting the queen of the Parisian demi-monde.

Notes

[1] See Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London, Bloomsbury, 2017).

[2] Tuberculosis’s expansive medical and cultural history, including its oversized impact on 1700s-1800s European fashion, diet, literature, and the visual and performing arts, has inspired a rich interdisciplinary catalogue of scholarship. I’ll highlight just a few works here: David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Thomas M. Daniel, Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997); Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: BasicBooks, 1994); and Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

[3] Meredith Conti, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (London: Routledge, 2018), 63-85.

[4] Nissen and Härmänmaa, ‘The Empire and the End of Decadence’, in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siecle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1-14, 7.

[5] John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985).

[6] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon theorizes and historicizes the performative commons in her book New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

[7] See Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siecle in Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002).

[8] Pirjo Lyytikainen, ‘Decadent Tropologies of Sickness’, in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End, 85-102, 85.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ron Grossman, ‘Hottest Ticket in Town? When Sarah Bernhardt Took Chicago By Storm’, Chicago Tribune, 23 September, 2016, available at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-flash-bernhardt-0925-md-20160921-story.html, accessed 30 May 2021.

[11] Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (1907), available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9100/9100-h/9100-h.htm, accessed 11 June 202.1

[12] Alan R. Young, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s Ophelia’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, available at: https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/article/view/2199/2098, accessed 30 May 2021.

[13] ‘TB Chronicles’, cdc.gov, available at: https://www.cdc.gov/tb/worldtbday/history.htm, accessed 11 June 2021.

[14] See Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Myth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

[15] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978).

[16] Gerda Taranow cites Hugo’s Sublime/Grotesque dyad as a way of understanding Bernhardt’s approach to acting in Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 195. In her early decades playing Marguerite, Bernhardt’s thinness was also an important signifier of the ‘wasting disease’.

[17] Marja Härmänmaa, ‘The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death’, in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End, 225-243, 225.

[18] Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille (La Dame Aux Camélias), trans. Edith Reynolds and Nigel Playfair, in Camille and Other Plays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 105-164, 162.

[19] Ibid 162.

[20] ‘La Dame Aux Camelias’, The Era, 25 June 1892.

[21] Nissen and Härmänmaa, ‘The Empire and the End of Decadence’, 3.

[22] Mary Agate, Madame Sarah (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 131

[23] Sharon Marcus, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s Exteriority Effects’, Modern Drama 60 (3) (Fall 2017): 296-321.

[24] Victoria Duckett, ‘Performing Art Nouveau: Sarah Bernhardt and the Development of Industrial Modernism,’ Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3 (October 2019), accessed 30 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0129.

[25] Francisque Sarcey, ‘Le representations françaises a Londres,’ Le Temps, 20 June 1881, 2, qtd. in Duckett, ‘Performing Art Nouveau.’